The goal of this project is to elucidate the structure of wild-type mitochondrial genes and to gain an understanding about the events that occur between the transcription of mitochondrial DNA and the formation of functional tRNA molecules. We will continue to characterize our mitochondrial DNA-pBR322 recombinant DNA bank with respect to tRNA genes and characterize these genes in terms of their location on the wild type genome, their sequences and their transcription. Using standard molecular biological techniques we will begin to elucidate the events necessary to express mitochondrial tRNA genes in wild type cells.